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Salad

Bottled Salad Dressing

A sweet and tangy salad dressing made with sugar, salt, cream, mustard, butter, vinegar, cayenne, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bottled Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add the sugar, salt, cream, mustard, vinegar, and cayenne; mix thoroughly.

  3. Heat the vinegar in a saucepan and add the butter; boil the mixture.

  4. Pour the hot mixture over the egg mixture, stirring well while cooking.

Bottle and store

  1. Allow to cool, then bottle and store in a cool place.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing as they cook and bind it into a smooth emulsion.
Butter
Adds richness and body, helping the dressing feel smooth and creamy.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the dressing its tang and helps preserve it.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot mixture over the egg mixture. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble if they get too hot too fast. Pouring the hot liquid slowly while stirring constantly gently warms the yolks so the dressing thickens smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream, butter, vinegar, egg):

  1. Mustardthe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Cucumberfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream, butter, vinegar, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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